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Knowing when a meeting should be an email is one of those leadership skills nobody explicitly teaches, yet the cost of getting it wrong adds up fast. If you have ever sat in a meeting thinking the whole thing could have been handled in a two-paragraph email, this episode is for you. And if you are the one calling those meetings, that is okay too. Most leaders never learned any other way.

Most meeting habits are inherited. You sat in meetings, absorbed what was modeled around you, and carried those patterns forward. That is how meeting culture spreads, good habits and bad ones alike. In this episode, I break down the difference between meetings that create real value and meetings that are really just a form of self-protection.

I introduce the concept of the CYA meeting: a meeting called not because the work requires it, but because the meeting organizer is worried about what happens if they do not hold one. Fear of being blamed, fear of a policy being ignored, fear of pushback. None of those are collaboration problems. They are confidence problems, and the fix is not a meeting.

I share the Meaning Making Test, a three-question framework I use in my Run Meetings That Matter training to help leaders decide quickly whether something needs to be a meeting or an email. I also walk through five specific situations where email is the right call, and what to do when you are the attendee in a meeting that should have been canceled years ago.

Listen and catch the full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also watch it and replay it on my YouTube channel, JanelAndersonPhD.

LINKS RELATED TO THIS EPISODE:

Episode 116 - My Best Advice for Hybrid Meetings

Episode 149 - The Power of Generative AI to Transform Meetings

Episode 153 - 6 Tips for Better Virtual Meetings

Episode 259 - You're Probably Doing 1:1 Meetings Wrong

Episode 261 - How to Speak Up in Meetings When You're an Introvert

Well, that meeting should have been an email. You've probably said that yourself, or you've thought it for sure, and you may have just been sitting in this meeting, watching the clock, waiting for the meeting to end, thinking somebody should have just sent an email about this. It would have been so much faster, and yes, you are correct. There are so many times when what ends up being not just an hour of your time, but an hour of a bunch of people's time, either collectively sitting around a conference room table, or dialed in on two Teams, or Zoom, or wherever you hold your online meetings, and what I want you to know is this: if you are a leader who is calling those meetings, this issue, this episode or issue is for you, not to make you feel bad about it, for sure, but to help you fix it, because most, for most people, nobody ever taught you how to hold a meeting, and even more importantly than that, when is a meeting the right tool, and when isn't it?

So this is a spot outside most people's field of awareness, because it's just not education that typically shows up in most management training programs, and so even if you are in a large organization that had some of the best management training and supervisor training that's out there, you may still be missing this critical skill. I do teach a class on it, I'll talk a little bit about that as we go on, but I want to leave you with some very actionable tools that you can put in play to make the right decision as to whether or not it needs to be a meeting or it should be an email. And today I am drinking from one of my favorite coffee cups here, and I'm holding it up to the camera, so if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see it, and it says, I survived another meeting that should have been an email, and if you haven't seen a mug like this, you've probably seen a meme on the internet or something like that.

So, but that's that's what we're digging into today. If you're not following me over on YouTube, where you can watch the episodes, hop over to YouTube and check us out there, we [email protected] forward slash Janel Janel Anderson, PhD, and that's always linked up in our show notes. This is episode 273 and so you can find the show notes at Janelle anderson.com forward slash 273 I will also be linking up in the show notes other episodes that I've done about meeting facilitation, because we're not really getting into the nuts and bolts of how to run a better meeting in this episode. We are making sure you're not making the mistake of holding a meeting that should have been an email, and I'll talk a little bit more about this towards the end of the episode, but next week on the show I'm going to be talking about how to make sure to actually have a meeting instead of sending an email when you do need a meeting, so this week it's what to do if it should be an email, and then next week it's what to do if it should be a meeting, and how do you know the difference there?

Okay, so again, most leaders are not calling unnecessary meetings because they're bad leaders. They're just doing it because they learned how to run meetings the same way most of us did, by sitting in meetings, and that is absorbing how to run a meeting through osmosis. That is absorbing meeting culture through osmosis. And unless you are paying close attention to what worked and what didn't, most people don't absorb the right things, they instead absorb the habits of whoever came before them, and the meetings that they sat in, the good habits and the bad habits. So this is one of the core ideas behind meeting hygiene. And if you haven't heard the term meeting hygiene before, meeting hygiene is really the idea that there is a sort of clean and sanitary way to run meetings.

Now, it doesn't mean your meetings still can't be fun, and that you can have some enjoyment out of it, but meeting hygiene really focuses on cleaning up your meetings, so that they're the most efficient and effective use of people's time. And so we're getting into some meeting hygiene in today's episode. So, these are again the practices that shape how we meet are rarely intentional, they get inherited, and that matters because the cost of meetings is real. So studies show that time spent in meetings has tripled since before the pandemic, tripled. Now nearly 70% of employees say excessive meetings prevent them from getting their actual work done, and that's not helpful.

Now, there's a spectrum of why meetings don't work, and types of meetings that just don't work, and so I want to talk about a couple of them really fast, and then we're going to spend the bulk of the time today talking about one specific type of meeting that you don't need to have, and why it keeps coming up over and over. Now, there, there are some meetings that were once useful, and they served their purpose. And then, whatever the extenuating circumstances were that created the need for that meeting had passed, but the meeting still stays on everybody's calendar, so I'll give you a couple of quick examples of this. One is during the early days of the pandemic, when everybody was worried for everybody else's health and safety.

There were oftentimes meetings that showed up on people's calendars, like every day we're going to have a quick 10 minute check in, just to make sure everybody's health and safety is fine, and then we'll hang up that meeting and get down to work, okay? And then the pandemic drew on longer and longer and longer, and we had a much better idea about people's health and safety, even though, yes, there continued to be concerns, but we weren't as it wasn't as acutely felt anymore, but some teams didn't let those meetings go, and they kept those 10 minute meetings, and I hear from people all the time, whether it's at a keynote or in my meetings facilitation class, or whatever, and they're like, oh, if I have to sit through one more meeting that should have been canceled years ago, so that's where it sometimes happens.

Then another place that it sometimes happens is if there is a project that a certain group of people are working on, that's and here I want to like frame project loosely, so not like a project that comes together with a project manager that has a finite beginning and a finite end. I'm not talking about those, because typically a project manager runs those, and once the project is complete, they do a couple of wrap-up meetings at the end, and then that is done. That meeting falls off everybody's calendar, so I'm not necessarily talking about those, but I'm talking about maybe like a meeting that is organized around a project that your intact team is working on, and so it's maybe not your regular team meeting, but a status update meeting about something else, and then the whatever exigency or circumstance caused that has passed, and the meeting still stays on your calendar.

So those are unuseful meetings, and a lot of times that doesn't even need to be an email, it just needs to be taken off of everybody's calendar. Okay, now another type of meeting that does not need to happen is that sometimes people substitute meetings for actually having a think about a topic or a project on their own. So, I am a big fan of scheduling meetings with yourself. It's so easy to grab somebody in the hallway and say, "Hey, let's hop into this conference room and talk about this idea that I have now. If you haven't had a think about the idea, I'm going to put myself out there and say you have no business dragging somebody else into a conference room and thought vomiting all over them.

Go have a think on your own about the topic, and do some discernment, and see, maybe you need to do some original research or some benchmark research against other companies who are doing something similar, other organizations that have done this in the past, or whatever your idea is about. Maybe it's a different industry altogether that you're taking ideas from, but go have a think about something before you start pulling other people into it. So, again, I see people substituting meetings for their own thinking, so if you're doing that again, just simply schedule the time on your own calendar as a meeting with yourself, and you can just do stream of consciousness speaking into just, say, like Microsoft Word with the dictation feature on, or you can write your ideas down, either by hand or type them up, whatever, but just get your ideas out on paper somehow, in the same type of way that you would if you were talking to, you know, somebody else in a meeting, just to bounce some ideas off of them.

In fact, I have an episode - we'll link this one up in the show notes too - and it's, it's called something like Why Talking to Yourself Makes You Smarter, and in fact, there is proven research out there that shows that talking out loud about something helps clarify and distill your thinking on it. So, go have a meeting with yourself, book yourself in a conference room if you need to, so you can close the door and talk out loud, either to your computer with the dictation on, or even just talking out loud while whiteboarding ideas on, on, on the wall on a whiteboard. Okay, now there's a third type of meeting, and this is where I want to spend the bulk of our time. Some meetings just don't have much of a stated purpose, but the person running the meeting not only thinks the meeting is necessary, but also important, and these are the meetings that don't get talked about enough.

Now, again, in I have a class, it's called Run Meetings That Matter. In that training session, I teach meeting facilitation skills, and I hear the same thing over and over from people, and oftentimes they're not admitting this about themselves, but they're saying this, they're observing this about other people. Now, of course, it is always easier to observe dysfunctional behavior or less than effective behavior when it's happening from somebody else, as opposed to when you are the one who is doing the ineffective or dysfunctional behavior, but so folks in this class tell me they see this behavior over and over and over, and it's that the person who scheduled the meeting was worried about something, not because the work required it, but because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn't, they were afraid nobody would read the email announcing the new policy, they were afraid that somebody would misunderstand the, you know, the why a decision was made a certain way, they were afraid of getting blamed if something went sideways, that is not a collaboration problem, that is a confidence problem, it is a leadership confidence problem, and the name that I give those meetings is the CYA meeting.

And if you have small children or dogs and cats around, just plug their ears right now, because it's a cover your ass meeting. And a CYA meeting is not called to create value, it's called to create cover. Let me repeat that, a CYA meeting is not called to create value, it is called to create cover, and by cover I mean protection. So, the person who's calling the CYA meeting is protecting themselves from some unknown potential repercussion that may or may not happen. Once you can see it, you're going to start noticing those CYA meetings everywhere, including on your own calendar and maybe even some of the ones that you're creating and hosting yourself. Okay, so how do you know if this is a CYA meeting or if this is truly a meeting that needs to be held?

How do you tell the difference between a meeting that's actually necessary and one that is absolutely something that should have been sent in an email and not an actual meeting, that it's basically a CYA meeting in disguise. So I want to, I've created something called the meeting, the meaning making test. Okay, meaning making test. And I think effective meetings are those that create meaning together with other people. We need to be in the same room at the same time, whether that's a virtual room, whether that is a physical room, or some combination of the both, but we need to be together in a room of some sort in real time, synchronous communication, making meaning together.

Okay, so that is what I mean by meaning making, and I want to give you the three questions that are part of the meaning making test that I've developed. So, question number one: Does this require real-time reaction to be understood correctly? Okay, so is there some nuance? Is there some subtlety? Could this get misunderstood or misconstrued if I were to send it in an email only? And a lot of times we do need to hear somebody's tone of voice, somebody's eye contact, facial expressions, and all of these social cues that help imbue the message with that additional meaning. So, does the meeting require real-time reaction to be understood correctly?

So, if I'm facilitating the meeting and I share some information that has a potential to be ambiguous or to cause uncertainty in the minds of the people who are receiving it. If we're live in that meeting, then I can be reading the room and seeing the facial expressions and seeing the looks of concern, or hearing the nervousness in somebody's voice as they respond or react to what I've just shared. Okay, so that's the first question. Does this require real-time reaction to be understood correctly? And if it does, get yourself in a meeting. Yes, book a meeting for that. Okay? Question, because you're making meaning together through some of that subtlety and some of that nuance, and you can't pick that up from email, and in fact, things often get misconstrued in email.

Okay. Question number two of the meaning making test: does this need to be worked through together again? The idea of being together synchronously again, whether that's virtual or co-located, does it need to be worked together? By worked together or worked through together, what I mean is there's some back and forth, there's some give and take, maybe it's a decision that needs to be made, that sort of thing, where we really do need some of that real-time collaboration happening in order to make meaning together, so that we can make progress on a particular issue. Okay, and then number three, the third question to ask yourself as part of the meaning making test is, am I scheduling this because the work requires it, or because I'm worried about what happens if I don't.

Again, this is the critical question. I mean, the other two are pretty important too, but this is the most critical question in the test. Am I scheduling this meeting because the work absolutely requires it, or because I'm worried about what happens if I don't have meaning? And if your answer, your honest to goodness answer to question three, is I'm worried. Well, then you've got yourself a cover your ass meeting on your hands, and the fix isn't a meeting. The fix is a well-written email and a little more trust in your team, and I would go so far as to say a little more trust in yourself. So, here's when email is the right call. You're sharing unambiguous information.

It's not going to cause questions. I mean, there might be some legit questions, but it's not going to cause, like, the kind of uncertainty that makes people worried if their job is still going to exist, you know, in two weeks, or, you know, whatever, or if they're, you know, a major client is going away, or something like that, so if you're sharing unambiguous information that might have some fact-based questions back and forth, but not any big areas that are going to cause consternation. Okay, number two, you're documenting a decision that has already been made. Okay, if the decision making practice, the decision making process happened in real time around a conference room table, or on a Teams meeting, or on a Zoom call, and all you're doing is saying, as you may, you know, you're documenting last in last week's meeting, we pushed the deadline for such and such project back three weeks to such and such date, right, something like that.

We don't need to call a meeting, we don't need to announce that in yet another meeting. If that's what happened, and the decision has already been made, then you can just share that information now. If it's a decision that comes from above, and again going back to that idea about like ambiguousness and so forth, if it's a decision that's coming from above and you need to send it down to your team if there is concern, consternation, ambiguity about that message, then by all means you're going to have that as a meeting, so that folks can ask those questions, get those questions answered, and you're going to need that, the social cues and the more subtle nuance of not just email, not just text on a screen, in order to communicate that.

Okay, number three, you need people to review something independently. So, there are many times where you may be sending out a draft of a document or of a policy or something like that, and you're sending it out to a handful of different people. You want them to independently review it and get their feedback back to you. You don't necessarily want them to be bouncing their feedback ideas off of each other, because that's going to then skew what their true feedback is. Now, it might be the case that you take that feedback, gather it up, and then you have a meeting, so that you can share that feedback more widely and get people's reaction to it. But if you just need people to review something independently, go ahead, send that as an email, give them very specific instructions about what you want them to review it for, and what the process is for getting it back to you, and by when.

Okay, very straightforward. Number four, you're asking for simple input. Okay, so if you have ideas, if you need ideas on dates, or I don't know, something that's just very straightforward. Send me your ideas on XYZ, okay? Just have people send you their input, and then again you may gather that input and put together a meeting around it, especially if you want to flesh out ideas, bounce ideas off of each other, and so forth. But just, you're just asking for simple input, that's an email. Now, a fifth one is that when the issue is very straightforward and the next action is clear, we got we reached this milestone on our project as of Friday, and now starting next week the following things will be set in motion, and again, maybe there's a project plan, everybody's consulting the project plan to find out exactly what that next action is, but it's just very clear.

It's an update that says we hit this milestone, and maybe there's a little even celebration around that email. We hit this milestone, yay, go team. And then everybody knows what to do next. Let's keep going. And again, the issue is straightforward, and the next action is clear. Now, when those conditions are true, and this isn't an exhaustive list, but those five give you a pretty good idea of when to send an email. Okay, there are other flavors and versions of things that should be sent as an email as well, but when most of these conditions are true, a meeting does not add clarity, it just adds time, it adds your people's time, and that math adds up fast.

That math adds up fast, because when you've got five people in the room, it's not just one hour, that's five hours that people could be doing something else, so they could be focusing on moving some independent project work forward, and so on. There's lots of things that they could be doing, but instead they're in your meeting. Okay, so if it is a CYA meeting, please, my friends, have the confidence in yourself, have the confidence in your team, and send the email. Okay, so I want to give you some takeaways as we wrap this episode. So, number one, run the meaning making test before every calendar invitation that you sent. Does this meeting require real time reaction, or this issue?

Does this issue require a real time reaction? Does it need to be worked through together. Is there some back and forth, some give and take? The third question: Am I doing this because the work demands it, or because I'm worried? Three questions 30 seconds. Use them every single time, even on those meetings that are already on your calendar. If you're the meeting owner, don't let those sit. Don't let those recurring meetings sit if they are not needed. Okay, it is up to you. You could, you, and you could, all you know, you can always experiment with things. You've heard me talk about experiments all the time. So, you could say, I want to experiment with taking this meeting off of our calendar, or having it once a month instead of once a week, or something like that.

See how that experiment goes. If you feel like you can't just let go of meeting altogether, all right. Number two, name the cover your ass meeting, because if you are scheduling something because you're afraid that nobody's going to read the email, follow the new policy, afraid you're going to get blamed, afraid of pushback for something, that is a cover your ass meeting. So recognizing that is the first step to stopping it. Ask yourself, if I weren't worried about this, would I still call this meeting? If I weren't worried I was going to get blamed. If I weren't worried that you know, fill in the blank, would I still call the meeting? Okay. Number three, write the email first before you book anything.

Draft the email that you would have sent and read it back. Does it cover what needs to be covered? Is the information clear? Is the next action obvious? If so, send it. You've just saved everyone an hour now. If not, then you've got some work to do, either to work more on that email, or maybe in the process of drafting that email, you've discovered no, there's too much ambiguity, there's too much uncertainty. We do need some back and forth, in which case absolutely schedule the meeting right. Number four, this one's one of my favorites. Do the math on your people's time. So, again, a one hour meeting with eight people isn't one hour, it's eight hours of collective focus time that people are out of.

They don't get that time back, so even unnecessary meetings have real cost in productivity and focus in trust, because if you're having a CYA meeting just because you don't trust people to read the email with the policy in it, there is an implicit lack of trust that's happening in that space. People are reading that, they're feeling it, so you know you might just need to amp up your trust. So start with treating your team's time the way you want your time treated. So do the math, and then number five for meeting attendees. So if you're, if you've been listening to this episode, going like, yep, I know the project manager who does that, I know the boss who does that, I know the supervisor who does that, and so on, and you're like, I just don't host a lot of meetings, I'm not in a role where I host meetings, so if you are the attendee, I want you to use a redirect, so this is the professional redirect, if you're being pulled into what feels like a CYA meeting, you can say something like, you know, you can say something very professionally and very respectfully, something like, you know, would it be helpful if I reviewed a summary document first, and if we only connect if there are questions when an issue like this comes up again, or you know, something like that.

So, you're offering, you may be putting yourself out there to offer to read through a document, or even to propose, hey, next time something like this comes up, I'd be happy to collaborate with you on a document that I think the whole team would understand, and would you know, maybe we write an FAQ of frequently asked questions about the new policy, and we distribute that. It might take, like, maybe it takes four hours of your time, but if there were eight people who were going to sit in the meeting, well, that's a collective savings of four hours across the organization, because you maybe invested the extra time to write the document, the FAQ, but everybody else benefited from it, and they read that FAQ in like 10 minutes, got their questions answered, and then you didn't need to have the meeting.

So, again, saving the organization a number of hours. All right, so now it is time to put it to work. This is the segment of the podcast where I give you your homework, I give you your marching orders about what to do with this episode. Okay, so this week, before you schedule your next meeting, run the meaning making test. Does it require real-time reaction? Does it require time to be worked through together, where there's that give and take, or are you just worried? And if it's the third one, write the email, your team will thank you, and if you don't run a lot of meetings, then I want you to find a way in to have a very professional and respectful conversation with somebody who holds a meeting that you think is either a CYA meeting or a meeting that maybe just should have been dropped off the calendar, because the circumstances that precipitated it have, you know wrap themselves up, and that meeting just isn't necessary anymore, and you know, at the risk of, I don't want you to be passive aggressive, but you could say, I just listened to this podcast episode, gave me some really interesting insights about meetings, and I thought this one meeting that we have matched some of the criteria, so again, I wouldn't just be like lobbing this at somebody and asking them to listen to it, because that is, is a potentially very passive aggressive.

I would say the meeting that we have on Tuesdays at 3pm seems to match some of these requirements, or some of the criteria that were listed in this podcast. I think you should listen to it, and then I'd be, you know, I'm happy to be a sounding board to see if we still need to be having this meeting. Okay, so if you are an individual contributor who does not host a lot of meetings, that is your way to put it to work this week. All right, stay tuned for episode 274 that comes out next week, because in that episode I am flipping the script on this, and we are not necessarily talking about the email that should have been a meeting, because the opposite problem is just as I mean the meeting, so all right, this is it gets a little complicated, right?

Okay, so next up we are not talking about the meeting that should have been an email, but rather we are talking about the email that should have been a meeting, because sometimes the problem is just the opposite, where there is a complex issue that requires a bunch of the things we've been talking about today, and it shows up in your inbox, but it really needs to be a meeting. Okay, so that's what we're talking about next week. We are talking about the email that needs to be a meeting, okay? The problem is just as real, and it is just as costly. So, I will catch you right back here next week on the Working Conversations podcast, where we will be talking about the flip side of this issue. Head on over to the show notes page, it is Janel anderson.com forward slash 273 where we are linking up the other episodes that I've done about meeting facilitation, because again, we didn't go into the nuts and bolts of meeting facilitation in this episode, so you can get lots of tips and strategies there on that, and I'll catch you right back here next week, all right. Be well, my friends. Bye.

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